


We Deserve Better

by CWverse



Category: The 100 (TV), The 100 Series - Kass Morgan
Genre: BAMF Clarke Griffin, BAMF Clarke Griffin/Lexa, BAMF Lexa (The 100), BAMF Raven Reyes, F/F, Fix-It, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, Wanheda Clarke Griffin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 21:15:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29782209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CWverse/pseuds/CWverse
Summary: Clarke travels back in time. She is sent to the Earth six-months before The 100 and she has a plan to make sure Skaikru doesn't go to war with the Coalition.
Relationships: Clarke Griffin/Lexa
Comments: 12
Kudos: 100





	We Deserve Better

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I Do Not Own The 100. If I did, Lexa and Clarke's lives would have been a Disney movie. There'd be challenges but the endgame would be happily ever after.
> 
> That's what this Fic.

* * *

The door slid open, and Clarke knew it was time.

Her eyes locked on the guard's boots, and she braced for the rush of fear, the flood of desperate panic. But as she rose up onto her elbow, peeling her shirt from the sweat-soaked cot, all she felt was relief.

She'd been in a single cell for weeks, but for Clarke, there was no such thing as solitary. Her memories were more oppressive than any cell walls. She heard the voices everywhere. They called from the corners of her dark cell. They filled the silence between her heartbeats. They screamed from the deepest recesses of her mind. It wasn't death she craved, but redemption. That was the only way the voices would stop.

Clarke had been confined for treason, but the truth was far worse than anyone could have imagined. Six months ago, her father—Jake Griffin—had discovered that after three hundred years, the Ark was dying. The oxygen system was failing and even the best estimates had the work taking longer than the system could keep the population alive.

The guard cleared his throat as he shifted his weight from side to side. "Prisoner number 319, please stand." He was younger than she remembered, and his uniform hung loosely from his lanky frame, betraying his status as a recent recruit. A few months of military rations weren't enough to banish the specter of malnutrition that haunted most of the Ark's population.

Clarke took a deep breath and rose to her feet. She wouldn't fight—not this time. After weeks in her cell, with nothing but the voices and her thoughts, she had gone over the plan again...and again...and again. It was all she did. The 100 had to do better. She had to do better.

Skaikru could _not_ go to war with the Coalition.

After Lexa—Clarke swallowed the knot in her throat as she thought about the last true Heda of the Coalition—after Lexa had died the war between the clans had begun. No matter how hard she tried to stop it, by then it was too late. Too many things had gone wrong. There was no trust between the Skaikru and the Coalition. Only distrust. A distrust that originated with The 100.

"Hold out your hands," he said, pulling a pair of metal restraints from the pocket of his blue uniform. Clarke shuddered as his skin brushed against hers. She hadn't seen another person since they'd place her in solitary, let alone touched one.

"Are they too tight?" he asked, his brusque tone frayed by a note of sympathy that made Clarke's chest ache. If she hadn't fought the first time, would he have been this kind?

She shook her head.

"Just sit on the bed. The doctor's on her way."

"What?" Clarke asked hoarsely, the words scraping against her throat.

The guard spoke without meeting her eyes. "I need you to sit down."

Clarke took an uneven step and stumbled. The guard reacted immediately, rushing to her side and aiding her to the bed. She took advantage of his compassion and slipped the extendable shock-baton from his belt. Sucking in her stomach, Clarke slid the weapon into the front of her pants.

It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough. "Thank you," she said, the double-meaning to her words lost on the guard.

She perched stiffly on the edge of her narrow bed and waited. Although she knew that solitary warped your perception of time, it was hard to believe that she had been back—in the past—for almost six months. The time she spent on Earth felt like an eternity ago, and Clarke couldn't wait to go back.

Despite all the hardships, Earth was where she belonged. _I can't go back to living on the Ark,_ she thought resolutely. Even if it was an option, Clarke couldn't stay in space. Not after living under Earth's beautiful blue sky. Hunting in her green forests.

No, Clarke could never go back to living on the Ark.

A figure appeared in the door and a tall, slender woman stepped into the cell. Although her long blonde hair partially obscured the pin on the collar of her lab coat, Clarke didn't need the insignia to recognize the woman as the Council's chief medical advisor. Not when she was also her mother.

"Hello, Clarke," Abby said pleasantly, as if she was greeting her daughter in the hospital dining room instead of a detention cell. "How are you?"

"I'll be better in a few minutes."

Abby winced at what she perceived as dark humor and turned to the guard. "Could you undo the cuffs and give us a moment, please?"

The guard shifted uncomfortably. "I'm not supposed to leave her unattended."

"You can wait right outside the door," Abby said with exaggerated patience. "She's an unarmed seventeen-year-old. And my daughter. I think I will be able to keep things under control."

The guard avoided Clarke's eyes as he removed the handcuffs. He gave Abby a nod as he stepped outside.

"Clarke, I—"

Clarke cut her mother off before she could say anymore. "Let's just get this over with," she said, curtly. She'd waited long enough.

"You're not being executed, Clarke," Abby promised, quietly. Unlike the guard, she stared into Clarke's eyes. "You're being sent to the ground."

Clarke remained silent. Her mother wasn't telling her anything she didn't already know.

After a moment of tense silence, Abby spoke again. "May I see your arm, please?"

She extended her arm. Abby reached into her coat pocket and produced a cloth that smelled of anti-septic. She swept it along the inside of Clarke's arm. "Don't worry, this isn't going to hurt."

Clarke closed her eyes. Abby grasped her arm, her fingers searching for a vein. Her grip tightened when she found it. _See you soon, Lexa._ Clarke took a deep breath as she felt a prick on the inside of her wrist.

"There. You're all set."

Clarke's eyes opened. She looked down and saw a metal bracelet clasped to her arm. She ran her finger along it, wincing as what felt like a dozen tiny needles pressed into her skin.

"It's a vital transponder," Abby said with infuriating coolness. "It will track your breathing and blood composition, and gather all sorts of useful information."

Clarke's eyes grew heavy, and she slumped into her mother's side. "Earth, Clarke," she heard her mother whisper. "You get to go to Earth."

* * *

"Prisoner of the Ark, hear me now."

Clarke blinked her eyes open. On a phone-sized screen in front of her, Chancellor Jaha was talking to her. _I slept longer than before._ That was Clarke's first thought. Her second was, _He managed to get me the bag._

"You have been given a second chance," Chancellor Jaha said, his voice echoing in the small pod. "And as your Chancellor, and your friend, it is my hope that you see this as not just a chance for you, but a chance for all of us. Indeed a chance for mankind itself. May we meet again."

_May we meet again,_ Clarke thought as the escape pod jerked suddenly. The windows of the pod were filling with hazy gray clouds. Closing her eyes and trying to keep her breaths even, Clarke held tight to the harness that kept her safe in her seat. She had been through this before, she knew there was supposed to be turbulence when the pod entered the Earth's atmosphere.

The shaking increased, followed by a strange hum. Clarke's harness dug into her stomach as her body lurched. She was thrown side-to-side, up and down, then side-to-side again. _Everything is fine,_ Clarke told herself, trying to stay calm. _It'll all be over in a minute._

Around her, the hum of the pod became a piercing wail, punctuated by a sickening crushing noise. Clarke opened her eyes. The windows of the pod were no longer full of gray.

They were covered in flames.

Bits of white-hot metal began raining down on her. Clarke raised her arms to protect her head and hissed as the molten debris scorched her arms.

The pod shook even hard, and with a roar, the retrorockets fired. Then everything happened at once. Trees suddenly took on detail, filled her whole field of visions with green, and Clarke knew if she hit them she would die, but her luck held, and just as she was about to hit the trees split into an open lane, a channel of fallen trees, a clearing with ruins and a small pond.

The pod, committed now to landing, to crashing, fell into the clearing like a stone, and Clarke pressed back against her seat and braced herself for the crash. There was a great snapping sound as the pod caught the top of the pines at the side of the clearing. Then a wild crash of ripping metal, and the pod rolled to the right and blew through the trees, out over the water and down, down to slam into the lake, skip once on water as hard as concrete, water that tore the front windows out and shattered the side windows.

Clarke saw nothing but sensed blue, cold blue-green as the water took her and the pod deeper, down into the water. She ripped at her harness until it released and pulled herself out of the shattered front window and swam, she swam until her hands caught at weeds and muck, pulling until her hands caught at last in the grass and brush and she felt her chest on land, felt her face in the coarse blades of grass.

For a moment, she was aware of only colors, not shapes. Stripes of blue, green, and brown so vibrant her rattled brain couldn't process them. A gust of wind passed over her, making her skin tingle and flooding her nose with scents Clarke had almost forgotten in solitary.

As far as she could see, there was nothing but trees. Hundreds of them, as if every tree on the planet had come to welcome them back to Earth. But she knew better now. Beyond the trees, there was so much more than anyone on the Ark could have ever imagined.

Clarke raised herself and crawled out of the water, grunting with the pain of movement. Her legs were on fire, and her forehead felt as if somebody had been pounding on it with a hammer—but she could move, that's what mattered. She pulled her legs out of the pond and crawled on her hands and knees until she was away from the wet-soft shore and near a small stand of brush.

She looked around the clearing and sighed in relief at what she saw. The ruins surrounding the small pond were familiar. Raven had come through and guided her pod away from Mount Weather and to the Supply Depot where she and Bellamy had first found guns for The 100.

Clarke forced herself up to her feet and limped around the pond to the ruins. She didn't want to spend any more time outside than she needed to. Not when she was alone, injured, and not knowing who had seen her pod crash. _I'm alive,_ she thought. _I'm alive. it could have been different. There could have been death. I could have been done._

Now that she made it to Earth, it was up to her to start changing things.

When she reached the storm-cellar doors that were still held together by an old and rusting lock, Clarke set the bag she had woken up with down. Inside was a gun, a flashlight, ration bars, and a hammer. She left the rations bars in the bag, tucked the gun and flashlight into her belt, and lifted the hammer above her head.

It only took one swing to bust the rusty lock.

Clarke stepped into the dark stairway leading down into the ground and closed the doors behind her. She pulled the flashlight from her belt and flicked it on. What she saw made her heart want to burst out of her chest.

Attached to the wall of the short stairway was a map of the bunker. A replica of the bunker under Mount Weather. And on the inside of the cellar doors was a locking mechanism that only someone inside could unlock. It was just a simple lock. Two metal handles and a sliding bar, but as she locked the doors Clarke knew Raven and John had made it.

Unlike her, they had gone deeper into the past. To the time before Praimfaya.

Clarke found the power breaker for part of the bunker and flipped it. Light exploded into existence, revealing the first floor of the bunker to be nothing more than a hotel-sized room with two doors. The cellar door and another on that led to the second floor of the bunker.

Next to the door leading to was a safe, and etched into the metal was a small note.

_We did it—hope you like the new digs._

_PS: Make sure to upgrade us to the newer models._

Clarke laughed and spun in the agreed-upon code that would open the safe. Inside was a small cushioned box holding two Mind Drives. Devices Raven engineered from the Allie 2.0. The technology that had evolved their plan to change the past from a pipe-dream to reality.


End file.
